REI Feminism: bell hooks and her early work

Introduction:

- born as Gloria Jean Watkins but is better known by her pen name which she adopted
from her grandmother, whom she admired and who was known for her "snappy and
bold tongue"

- hooks put her name in lowercase letters in order to distinguish herself from her
grandmother and also to put emphasis on "substance of book" not who she really is

- bell hooks is an American author, feminist and social activist and a useful exampler of
feminism attending to race/ethnicity/imperialism (REI) as her work ranged over the
years from Modernist Differences focus on Identity towards more Postmodern-
influenced concerns with diversity and multiplicity

Early work

Hooks early work depicts Modernist, strongly Identity oriented approach which stresses
black/white differences in the context of the USA. This focus enables a critique of Feminism
as largely white Feminism. But from the late 1980's she stresses postmodern interest in
acknowledging differences within "race" identity (African American) as well as within gender
identities.

Among writers who have influenced her the most is African American abolitionist and
feminist Sojourner Truth, born slave. After she gained freedom she adopted name Sojourner
Truth as she saw herself as called by God to travel around and testify about the sins against
her people. She associated herself with women's rights. In hooks first major work Ain't I a
woman: Black Women and Feminism hooks uses Truth's famous phrase Ain't I a woman,
arguing that Truth uses her own personal experience to as evidence to her political claims
what is also a characteristic of hooks work. Bell hooks published this work in 1981 which
was written when she was undergraduate student. It gained widespread recognition as an
influential contribution to postmodern feminist thought. It examines several themes which
were repeated in her later work: the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women,
devaluation of black womanhood, media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of
white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, the marginalizing of black woman and the disregard
of issues of race and class within feminism.
She asks question: "What is Feminism?" According to her rooted in fear and not fantasy.
"Feminism is end to sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression".

In her works Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center and Talking back she writes as a black
African American feminist and explains that those voices have been marginalized. In From
Margin to Centre she writes: "To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the
main body." She used the work as a platform to offer a new, more inclusive feminist theory.
Her theory encouraged the long-lasting idea of sisterhood but advocates for women to
acknowledge their differences while still accepting each other. Her early work came out of
so-called "difference" approach. Her writing represents a challenge to the "singular
difference" orientation and she is highly critical of woman-centred accounts in which
Feminism becomes a means to talk only of gender and tend to exclude race difference. So her
work may be located as dealing with multiple Difference: race and gender. Bell hooks begins
her writing from her marginalized position as a black woman and her sense of the invisibility
of black (African American) women's experience, both in Feminism and writings on
race/ethnicity what reminds us of Sojourner Truth. They both speak of Identity politics: and
identity as part of Universal human/woman and as a black woman. They refuse to suppress
their difference but they are also a part of Universal human. In order to claim civil rights they
should make their womanhood/humanity and suppression visible through Identity politics,
based on a view that the most useful starting point for development and change from the
status arises from our own identity (experience of oppression). Hooks points out the ways in
which black women in the USA are excluded and oppressed and in From Margin to Centre
and inverts white feminists claims to offer an authentic voice of oppression of women.
Moreover, she sees white women's claims to share in oppression as doubtful and that black
women's suffering is genuine, more true.

She rejects woman-centred feminism, the notion of a common bond between women. In Ain't
I a Woman hooks argues that race and class oppression make difference between women, that
race and class-based power relations are more oppressive than gender hierarchy. In her earlier
work she argues that oppression/suffering is differential and that degree of suffering can be
measured. She makes difference between privileged women and poor ones, and links white
feminists with privilege and black with poverty.

She is critical of the works of some white feminists like Betty Frierton's classic The Feminine
Mystique which focuses on the oppression of women in their domestic housewife roles,
failing to attend to race and class. Instead she writes about very specific (white) experience
and fails to note that most black woman don't have the chance to be housewives.

In From Margin to Centre hooks puts woman in the core of Feminism as they can offer most
profound comprehension for a feminist politics since they experience the greatest level of
oppression. She questions whether feminists who are white and middle-class are truly
oppressed or merely discriminated against.

Hooks: "There are white women who had never considered resisting male dominance until the
feminist movement created and awareness that they could and should. My awareness of
feminist struggle was stimulated by social circumstance."

Hooks like Truth locates black woman from the margin to the centre of feminist thinking as
black women did not have other to oppress, in contrast to white women and black men who
were both oppressed and oppressors. For this reason they deserve central role in feminist
theory.

She was criticised by other REI feminists because of this, because she focused mostly on
racism and common "race identity" to the exclusion of mentioning gender. She was actually
seen as imposing a falsely unified "race essentialism" instead of "gender essentialism" what
she actually disapproved.